Young people should have the right to control and
direct their own learning; that is, to decide what they want to
learn, and when, where, how, how much, how fast, and with what
help they want to learn it. To be still more specific, I want them
to have the right to decide if, when, how much, and by whom they
want to be taught and the right to decide whether they want
to learn in a school and if so which one and for how much of the
time.

No human right, except the right to life itself, is more
fundamental than this. A person's freedom of learning is part of
his freedom of thought, even more basic than his freedom of
speech. If we take from someone his right to decide what he will
be curious about, we destroy his freedom of thought. We say, in
effect, you must think not about what interests and concerns you,
but about what interests and concerns us.

We might call this the right of curiosity, the right to ask
whatever questions are most important to us. As adults, we assume
that we have the right to decide what does or does not interest
us, what we will look into and what we will leave alone. We take
this right for granted, cannot imagine that it might be taken away
from us. Indeed, as far as I know, it has never been written into
any body of law. Even the writers of our Constitution did not
mention it. They thought it was enough to guarantee citizens the
freedom of speech and the freedom to spread their ideas as widely
as they wished and could. It did not occur to them that even the
most tyrannical government would try to control people's minds,
what they thought and knew. That idea was to come later, under the
benevolent guise of compulsory universal education.

We might call this
the right of curiosity.

This right of each of us to control our own learning
is now in danger. When we put into our laws the highly
authoritarian notion that someone should and could decide what all
young people were to learn and, beyond that, could do whatever
might seem necessary (which now includes dosing them with drugs)
to compel them to learn it, we took a long step down a very steep
and dangerous path. The requirement that a child go to school, for
about six hours a day, 180 days a year, for about ten years,
whether or not he learns anything there, whether or not he already
knows it or could learn it faster or better somewhere else, is
such a gross violation of civil liberties that few adults would
stand for it. But the child who resists is treated as a criminal.

The right I ask for the young is a right that I want to
preserve for the rest of us, the right to decide what goes into
our minds. This is much more than the right to decide whether
or when or how much to go to school or what school you want to go
to. That right is important, but it is only part of a much larger
and more fundamental right, which I might call the right to learn,
as opposed to being educated, i.e. made to learn what
someone else thinks would be good for you. It is not just
compulsory schooling but compulsory education that I oppose
and want to do away with.

That children might have the control of their own learning,
including the right to decide if, when, how much, and where they
wanted to go to school, frightens and angers many people. They ask
me, "Are you saying that if the parents wanted the child to
go to school, and the child didn't want to go, that he wouldn't
have to go? Are you saying that if the parents wanted the child to
go to one school, and the child wanted to go to another, that the
child would have the right to decide?" Yes, that is what I
say. Some people ask, "If school wasn't compulsory, wouldn't
many parents take their children out of school to exploit their
labor in one way or another?" Such questions are often both
snobbish and hypocritical. The questioner assumes and implies
(though rarely says) that these bad parents are people poorer and
less schooled than he. Also, though he appears to be defending the
right of children to go to school, what he really is defending is
the right of the state to compel them to go whether they want to
or not. What he wants, in short, is that children should be in
school, not that they should have any choice about going.

The whole of school
is worse than
the sum of its parts.

But saying that children should have the right to choose to go
or not to go to school does not mean that the ideas and wishes of
the parents would have no weight. Unless he is estranged from his
parents and rebelling against them, a child cares very much about
what they think and want. Most of the time, he doesn't want to
anger or worry or disappoint them. Right now, in families where
the parents feel that they have some choice about their children's
schooling, there is much bargaining about schools. Such parents,
when their children are little, often ask them whether they want
to go to nursery school or kindergarten. Or they may take them to
school for a while to try it out. Or, if they have a choice of
schools, they may take them to several to see which they think
they will like the best. Later, they care whether the child likes
his school. If he does not, they try to do something about it, get
him out of it, find a school he will like.

I know some parents who for years had a running
bargain with their children, "If on a given day you just
can't stand the thought of school, you don't feel well, you are
afraid of something that may happen, you have something of your
own that you very much want to do - well, you can stay home."
Needless to say, the schools, with their supporting experts, fight
it with all their might - Don't Give in to Your Child, Make Him Go
to School, He's Got to Learn. Some parents, when their own plans
make it possible for them to take an interesting trip, take their
children with them. They don't ask the school's permission, they
just go. If the child doesn't want to make the trip and would
rather stay in school, they work out a way for him to do that.
Some parents, when their child is frightened, unhappy, and
suffering in school, as many children are, just take him out. Hal
Bennett, in his excellent book No More Public School, talks
about ways to do this.

To say that children should have the right to control and
direct their own learning, to go to school or not as they choose,
does not mean that the law would forbid the parents to express an
opinion or wish or strong desire on the matter. It only means that
if their natural authority is not strong enough the parents can't
call in the cops to make the child do what they are not able to
persuade him to do. And the law may say that there is a limit to
the amount of pressure or coercion the parents can apply to the
child to deny him a choice that he has a legal right to make.

When I urge that children should control their learning there
is one argument that people bring up so often that I feel I must
anticipate and meet it here. It says that schools are a place
where children can for a while be protected against the bad
influences of the world outside, particularly from its greed,
dishonesty, and commercialism. It says that in school children may
have a glimpse of a higher way of life, of people acting from
other and better motives than greed and fear. People say, "We
know that society is bad enough as it is and that children will be
exposed to it and corrupted by it soon enough. But if we let
children go out into the larger world as soon as they wanted, they
would be tempted and corrupted just that much sooner."

They seem to believe that schools are better, more honorable
places than the world outside - what a friend of mine at Harvard
once called "museums of virtue." Or that people in
school, both children and adults, act from higher and better
motives than people outside. In this they are mistaken. There are,
of course, some good schools. But on the whole, far from being the
opposite of, or an antidote to, the world outside, with all its
envy, fear, greed, and obsessive competitiveness, the schools are
very much like it. If anything, they are worse, a terrible,
abstract, simplified caricature of it. In the world outside the
school, some work, at least, is done honestly and well, for its
own sake, not just to get ahead of others; people are not
everywhere and always being set in competition against each other;
people are not (or not yet) in every minute of their lives subject
to the arbitrary, irrevocable orders and judgment of others. But
in most schools, a student is every minute doing what others tell
him, subject to their judgment, in situations in which he can only
win at the expense of other students.

No other institution
does more harm
to more people.

This is a harsh judgment. Let me say again, as I
have before, that schools are worse than most of the people in
them and that many of these people do many harmful things they
would rather not do, and a great many other harmful things that
they do not even see as harmful. The whole of school is much worse
than the sum of its parts. There are very few people in the U.S.
today (or perhaps anywhere, any time) in any occupation,
who could be trusted with the kind of power that schools give most
teachers over their students. Schools seem to me among the most
anti-democratic, most authoritarian, most destructive, and most
dangerous institutions of modern society. No other institution
does more harm or more lasting harm to more people or destroys so
much of their curiosity, independence, trust, dignity, and sense
of identity and worth. Even quite kindly schools are inhibited and
corrupted by the knowledge of children and teachers alike that
they are performing for the judgment and approval of others
- the children for the teachers; the teachers for the parents,
supervisors, school board, or the state. No one is ever free from
feeling that he is being judged all the time, or soon may be. Even
after the best class experiences teachers must ask themselves,
"Were we right to do that? Can we prove we were right? Will
it get us in trouble?"

What corrupts the school, and makes it so much worse than most
of the people in it, or than they would like it to be, is its
power - just as their powerlessness corrupts the students. The
school is corrupted by the endless anxious demand of the parents
to know how their child is doing - meaning is he ahead of the
other kids - and their demand that he be kept ahead. Schools do
not protect children from the badness of the world outside. They
are at least as bad as the world outside, and the harm they do to
the children in their power creates much of the badness of the
world outside. The sickness of the modern world is in many ways a
school-induced sickness. It is in school that most people learn to
expect and accept that some expert can always place them in some
sort of rank or hierarchy. It is in school that we meet, become
used to, and learn to believe in the totally controlled society.
The school is the closest we have yet been able to come to
Huxley's Brave New World, with its alphas and betas, deltas
and epsilons - and now it even has its soma. Everyone, including
children, should have the right to say "No!" to it.